Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? 807
Mooga writes "I am a hard-core user of Firefox 3.6.x who has chosen to stick with the older, yet supported version of Firefox for many years now. However, 3.6.x will soon hit end-of-life, making my life, and the lives of similar users, much more complicated. 3.6.x has been known for generally being more stable and using less RAM than the modern Firefox 10 and even Chrome. The older version of Firefox is already having issues rendering modern websites. What are others who have been holding onto 3.6.x planning on doing?"
Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not understand techie luddites. Why didn't you upgrade? Why the anxiety? It's a fucking WEB BROWSER. Life will go on.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except this Luddite's primary arguments, RAM allocation and stability, are apparently bullshit. Why even humor him with a Slashdot submission?
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could have sworn back in the 3.6 days that everyone was complaining about its RAM usage, and that some pined for the 2.0 days of better RAM usage.
Isnt there a saying about the grass being greener?
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
I was screaming about RAM usage because it sucked back then too.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
For example right now I have: VS 2010 pro, Vuze, VLC running a video, iTunes, and FF 10 running on a Win 7 box which is notorious for being RAM happy (actually a good thing if the ram is there it might as well have stuff loaded in it just in case you ask for it later), anyways 2.8GB of RAM used. FF is using 200MB of that, I really don't care that 1/19th of my used RAM is my browser. The quick access to streaming porn is more than worth it to me.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Informative)
Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?c2=1131 [microsoft.com]
While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today. It costs more money to sit around whining than it does to get more ram than you know what to do with.
Profiles gone? I don't know what you're talking about. Start any modern firefox with the flags -no-remote to prevent opening another window of an existing firefox instance, and -profilemanager to open the profile management/selection window. I have all my shortcuts changed to start it that way by default.
My mobile has more ram than your computer.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
My phone too outpowers his PC but his point is still correct: His PC is perfectly adequate for browsing the web.
Just because Win2k is out of support doesn't mean that it's suddenly inoperable. It means you wouldn't run business systems on it due to the corporate risk involved.
It's not luddism to decline to upgrade something that's working effectively, especially when the upgrade has high cost and questionable benefits.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not luddism to decline to upgrade something that's working effectively, especially when the upgrade has high cost and questionable benefits.
I would argue that when the "something that's working effectively" is a computer where you have to ask whether it meets the spec for Windows XP, and which is out-powered by many cellular telephones, the "high cost and questionable benefits" goes out the window.
Consider: you can buy a cheap laptop for $400 or so. If you don't mind recycling your old monitor, you can get a cheap desktop for $300 or so. For that, you get a system that is *significantly* faster, which should equate to a large savings in time, not to mention the ability to run a modern OS, which brings security advantages. And that's without even considering the electricity savings that could be had by building a system with a modern 80plus power supply.
Just doing a basic pricing on the cheapest system I can build on Newegg, try:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138326 [newegg.ca] ($60 - cpu/motherboard/vga, via c7-d 1.8ghz dual core, mini itx)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154061 [newegg.ca] ($40 - case, mini itx/atx, with 240W power supply)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313102 [newegg.ca] ($20 - memory 2x2GB DDR3)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152181 [newegg.ca] ($80 - hard drive, 500GB)
Total cost, $200. And half of that is the hard drive, so if you're willing to salvage the old hard drive and throw in an IDE to SATA conversion kit, you can put it together for about $120. And that's a computer that will run Windows 7 (I've run Win7 x32 on a Via c7 1.5GHz system with 2GB of RAM, and it performed relatively well). Linux would fly on it. It'll still wipe the floor with a 10+-year old Windows 2000 system in performance, and it'll use a fraction of the electricity, possibly low enough to cover the initial $120 outlay within a few months (and certainly within a year). And you don't need an optical drive, because Windows 7 and Linux can both be installed from USB. (even if you did want an optical drive, it only adds $20 to the equation).
So no. It is luddism to refuse to upgrade it. Either that, or a false sense of economy.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue shouldn't be if a 10 year old computer is still operatable. Chances are, it runs just fine. I got a Commodore 64 that still runs like it did the day I bought it. The computer should be fine for running 10 year old software. However, if you are trying to run modern software on it, you need a modern computer. And if you are trying to go to websites that are in HTML5 and CSS and Flash, you need a modern webbrowser. And that seems to be the issue - I bet there is nothing wrong with his decade-old computer, he is just trying to run modern stuff on it. If you want to run modern software, than freakin' upgrade your computer already!
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
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I once got a Windows 3.1 visitor to my blog, it was quite astonishing to see. Windows 98 is also seen sometimes.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Informative)
The easiest is to install Opera, the only browser with official Windows 2000 support AFAIK and start looking at what your next step is going to be to get off Windows 2000.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox 3.6 will continue to work on the web. It may not work perfectly but it works so if you want to stay in the past you can but buying an extra 512 meg of ram and putting XP on it is a trivial and cheap task.
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I had 20 tabs open, I was at 350Mb in the latest FF. (10.0.2)
Same tabs open in IE 9, 1Gb over 10 separate processes
the latest Chrome Browser was using 20 processes and a total of 400Mb.
a Single tab (the home screen), Chrome uses 3 Processes and 25Mb RAM. Firefox (on this page alone) uses 1 process and 200Mb RAM.
FF has shored up it's RAM usage per tab it seems, but not on initial launch. How it fares in the long term, I can't comment. I close my browser regularly so I don't see any long-term leaks if they ex
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Why does it take you 2.8 GB of RAM to do something that used to be done in 32 MB with room to spare?
In 1994 / 1995, the web was just about HTML 2.0, but mainly HTML 1.0 plus browser extensions. I've written code that will happily handle pretty much any web page from that era (except frames), and it was under a thousand lines of code. Web pages were designed to load in 10 seconds on a 14.4kbps modem, so were typically very small and contained very few images, no scripts, and certainly no video.
Now, HTML documents are large. This Slashdot page is 1MB of text plus markup alone. On your 32MB machine,
Moore's law and memory capacity (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
3.6 did use more memory than 2. Every later version used more and more memory up until version 8. Version 8 still used more memory than 3.6. Version 10 may or may not use more memory, but from version 8 forward the browser is way faster. Version 3.6 was rock solid stability wise for a long time. It's old now. I moved off it sometime last year. Version 10.0 is the new long term support version. It's the only logical choice to run now. I found 4, 5, 6, 7, and even 8 to be less stable. Which ought to be expected. 3.6 was after all a .6 version and not a .0 version, with many more bugfixes along the way. 10.0 is twice the disk size as 3.6, but again it's going to be WAY faster, but perhaps not much different on the memory landscape. The poster should begin migrating now, before support ends.
That is if you're one of those people who believes in keeping your system up to date, security patch wise. Kind of pointless to change the locks once everything is cracked open and stolen. So I guess I'm saying UPGRADE NOW to 10.0, while you have a choice.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
10.0 is twice the disk size as 3.6, but again it's going to be WAY faster, but perhaps not much different on the memory landscape.
10.0 has HTML5 support and a totally different, much faster JS engine. I'll give them a break if it takes up a little more diskspace.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Interesting)
10 might take more disk space. But it is far supieror in memory usage.
I keep the browser open for weeks with multiple tabs open and i've quite often seen it hit 1GB+ of memory use, but around version 8-9 that it went down. while it's still one of the more memory hungry it's memory usage doesn't seem to be stacking up as much.
The only reason that I can see for holding back from the latest version would be, because of potential compatibility with existing sites. But this is mainly for corporates with intranet sites which might still have legacy html. I've personally not run into any such issues. For personal use I see no reason not to update to the latest version. In my experiance while in some version there have been regressions, it's generally been faster and more memory efficient.
I think mozilla messed royally up with this fast update cycle. Had they slowed it down just a tad bit and not publically said anything about a fast updating and version numbers, most people would just update to the latest version without so much anxiety.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer is Soulskill. Have you seen the last dozen or so stories on the front page? Ridiculous.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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ya, they are missing out on all these awesome new features Mozilla has added.
Like.........umm........
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox Sync is pretty awesome if you use multiple computers, requires version 4 and above.
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No it doesn't. There is an extension for Firefox Sync on Firefox 3.6.
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Like ummm ... 3x the speed.
Yeah, nothing good there. Who wants more speed?
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
ya, they are missing out on all these awesome new features Mozilla has added.
Like.........umm........
HTML5 support.
Memory leaks are finally mostly fixed.
Memory usage is drastically reduced.
UI lag has been partially fixed.
Performance is massively improved.
The UI is more compact by default, though you can move the tabs back to the bottom and reinstall the status bar if you want.
[Addon incompatibility was addressed in 10, the browser no longer auto-disables add-ons after update; yes, that was dumb but they finally fixed it]
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If the developers of Firefox properly understood just how many things BREAK when upgrading a browser, maybe then they would design things to make it easy for two or more versions of Firefox to co-exist (even if there is a requirement that any one user only be using one version at a time and thus require switching user to use a different version). Then, it would at least be easier to migrate gracefully to their new versions.
As it is now, it's a major pain in the arse to upgrade Firefox, usually much worse t
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If the developers of Firefox properly understood just how many things BREAK when upgrading a browser, maybe then they would design things to make it easy for two or more versions of Firefox to co-exist ...
I ... what? ... Are you crazy?!?
Assuming you're a developer building apps for multiple versions of Firefox releases, ... What!?!
You're woefully ignorant of basic features that your target platform provides out of the box. Got it.
This is the stupidest /. discussion EVAR!
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I got 2 letters for you about development that will tell you why he does that:
QA
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Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:4, Insightful)
there's a reason for that. It's unsupported hardware. It's been abandoned as a platform. You'd be wise to replace it.
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Please this is a CPU architecture change. It would be like dusting off your 286 and getting all bitchy that windows now wants at least 32 bit hardware.
Chances are there will be some non-mainstream browser available for the PPC till the end of time. You might have to use something called Goggzilly 3.1.233 that no one knows about other than people with the same problem and doesn't have all your favorite plugins but people will probably find a way to make the dinosaurs keep rendering pages.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
Check out TenFourFox [floodgap.com]. Current versions of Firefox, compiled for PowerPC Macs.
Re:Why the anxiety? (Score:5, Informative)
But no PPC support for later browsers will send it to the landfill before that.
--- Eventually we'll be unable to access websites that rely on features in recent versions of flash, java or html5.
You can always put Linux on it. Even the latest [ubuntu.com] Ubuntu runs on PowerPC, which I expect includes an updated Firefox.
The disadvantage is no Flash, but you really shouldn't be running Flash on PowerPC anyway because the latest version has serious security unpatched vulnerabilities. And Flash is slowly disappearing anyway -- your iMac will probably be more useful a couple years from now when Flash is dead than it is now!
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There is no technical reason videos and games need Flash. And I don't like making system configuration decisions based on PHB reasoning.
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"A PowerPC iMac I have is more than adequate for light office use,"
Huh? you have a wierd idea of it's capabilities. I edit Full HD video on one weekly. a PPC machine has a lot of horsepower in it to do heavy lifting.
in fact, the PPC Quad core 2.5ghz box here is FASTER at rendering HD video than the new Quad Core i7 box they bought. I'd say old PPC machines still kick the arse of the new stuff.
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Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
here's what you were really asking through your raging: Why did Firefox drastically increase build numbers for only minor releases?
great question AC, here's the answer. Public opinion held consensus that the higher the build number, the more advanced the browser. As IE was in build 9, Google chrome was in version 10, and Opera was in version 11 when Firefox version 4.0 came out, Mozilla decided to abandon their convention for build numbers and play catch-up. Nothing more than public opinion.
I think this was a smart decision.
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Exactly because, you know, most blokes will be playing at 10. This one goes one higher.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
So, basically, everyone else was lying about how advanced they were, so Firefox should, too?
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Informative)
In the past, upgrades usually brought at least some benefits. There'd be useful new features
The reason 3.6 can't render some web sites is because it doesn't have the new features.
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Here's a full list [caniuse.com] of web features that 3.6 doesn't support and FF 12 does. If you use a website that employes any of those technologies, you'll lose some of the experience you were supposed to get.
And web developers won't care. I think this is an important note. Old IE users (6/7/8) make up a large enough chunk of the web that legacy support for them is considered a higher priority for most, but FF 3.6 users are very much a minority, so you can't expect any support going forward.
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"Free" doesn't mean "exempt from criticism." I wish people would stop saying things such as this.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Funny)
Once they start advertising, the whole 'you get what you pay for' argument is useless.
True. If it doesn't work as advertised you're entitled to a full refund.
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You can criticise anything you want any time you want, but don't always expect a positive response because every group has it's share of douchebags (F/OSS is no exception). The Mozilla Foundation advertising on a web page, in a newspaper or by planting little flags in dog turds makes absolutely no difference in law or custom, that's something you've imagined.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
So? Does that mean they owe him a good product or anything?
Company offers free product, of course in the hopes of attracting people.
People shrug and move on.
End of story.
Some people of course feel like they have a right to bitch and moan instead of simply moving on to greener pastures or actually getting involved in producing a product that they like (which in the case of Mozilla is an actual option). That doesn't mean these people aren't a pain in the rear.
Re:As users, we're getting fucked over. That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, you can mod my posts down if you like. Fine. Just remember, though, that when you start talking your product up, you're elevating it from "community project' to "this is ready for prime-time". That means it'll get criticized. It doesn't matter what the price is, that door has been opened.
"You get what you pay for" is a common cop-out with complaints about OSS. When you do that, you're not saying "see, OSS really can replace proprietary software", you're saying "It's inferior, you know that already, don't bitch."
Don't play that card, it only hurts OSS.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't seem too long ago that I was having the same questions about Netscape Navigator 4.5. I survived.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't seem too long ago that I was having the same questions about Netscape Navigator 4.5.
So how did you get a coma in the first place?
Just upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being a pain the ass and upgrade.
It's a browser, not some server software.
Not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
I have switched to Chrome and am happy with seamless updates.
Really, what advantages do you have with using an old, outdated version? Smaller memory footprint, well, are you actually low on memory? RAM is cheap. You already said that version 3.X is slower than modern builds.
The only suggestion I have is live with the new version progression, stop being concerned with it and live with what the developers are doing. Either that or move to gentoo and compile you own!
Re:Not an issue (Score:4, Interesting)
The advantages to sticking with an older version are, you already know it works, and your add-ons work with it. You also know that the good gentleman at Firefox haven't decided to rearrange the interface again for no apparent reason. Finally, of course, the new versions don't actually seem to have any interesting new features.
I updated from 3.5 to the latest version, recently, because of some problem where the browser would just stall out for 3-4 seconds, becoming completely unresponsive. The update does seem to have fixed that problem. Otherwise, I haven't really noticed any significant difference, which is really just fine with me.
Re:Not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
That argument is disingenuous and irrelevant. On the same hardware, Chrome 16 would run for seven days and only edge up to about 450MB RAM use. Firefox 10, after over two weeks of continuous operation is hovering in the 350MB range. There is no excuse for a web browser process to hit the GB mark, none.
As for 2GB of RAM being cheap, that's a poor excuse. When Chrome hits 1GB of RAM, it causes my entire system to begin to slow down. It affects Firefox, GNOME, even my terminal windows. The instant I kill it and restart, everything is happy again, until it creeps up there and starts thrashing the memory manager again.
Re:Not an issue (Score:4, Informative)
Woah, what Firefox 10 are you running? I've been running it for 2 hours and it's already at 400MB of RAM, and the 2 hour mark is just because I restarted it to release the gig and a half it was using.
Re:Not an issue (Score:5, Interesting)
> There is no excuse for a web browser process to hit the GB mark, none.
So if all the images that are open in your web browsers all add up to 2 GB of uncompressed pixel data then the browser still shouldn't use hit the GB mark? I want my computer to be magical too.
Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox 9 is perfectly fine. No problems.
Who gives a shit if it uses a little bit more memory. I just bought 16GB of RAM for $75. It isn't 1991 anymore.
I don't like the bullshit upgrade schedule where they make a few minor improvements and call it a major new release. That's why I'll probably stay with 9 for a while. But there is no reason to stay with 3.6.
Re:Get over it already (Score:4, Interesting)
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But the user never sees the updates.
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Who gives a shit if it uses a little bit more memory. I just bought 16GB of RAM for $75. It isn't 1991 anymore.
Have a look at your local DDR2 RAM prices. Its become legacy hardware and is rather expensive.
Re:Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a very poor memory as in 1991 memory usage was not 300-500 MB just for a silly webbrowser.
And your argument that memory is cheap is true for DDR3, but if you've got a bit older machine like I have that's perefctly fine for everything I use it, using DDR2, it's a lot more expensive.
Memory use of applications and Xorg too is just insane these days. Even Xemacs that I often use, I've got one editing a html file and it uses 32 MB (and that's a low value, it's often 100MB). Why? What the hell does it all load and do compared to the mid-late 1990s where you could use it without hogging all RAM on a 32MB machine?
Always the arguments by people like you is 'memory is cheap', but it's not really. Not needing new memory is cheaper than new memory. Not needing to waste time on 'why the hell is my memory not enough any more' is better than wasting time on it. Sometimes you even need to upgrade your PC to get affordable new memory. That's the case esp. for a slightly older PC of my niece. Your argument is also the reason why developers don't seem to give a shit about memory footprint, whatever they claim. 300MB for browsing some webpages? Absolutely ludicrous. Thunderbird seems to have a complete built in webbrowser in it to display HTML stuff. Nuke all that crap and let it do emails! Then it wouldn't need 200-300MB.
It's a vicious circle of upgrades that are not really necessary as quickly as they would be if applications didn't load so much useless crap and do so much useless crap.
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Too bad that "client" versions of 32bit Windows only allow up to 4GB address space.
And installing a new version of Windows is much worse than just using software that fits in the 4GB. Hell, I'd rather buy a DRAM SSD and put the pagefile on it than do a fresh install of Windows.
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I mostly agree with this. The issue isn't stability or RAM. It's retarded upgrade schedule confounded by minimalist design trend. I'm on 3.6 until the minimalist trend dies and upgrade schedule recover their sanity.
P.S. Most exploits are rather irrelevant when you combine noscript, adblock, ghostery and a decent firewall. Or simply run browser sandboxed (sandboxie et al).
Re:Get over it already (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see a reason to stay on 3.6. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let it die.
(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.
The UI is a huge reason not to upgrade. (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefits you mention are immediately negated by the horrible UI that Firefox has had starting with version 4.
They threw out decades of experience, knowledge and convention, for absolutely no gains whatsoever.
Getting rid of the menu bar by default was just plain stupid. Then they followed it up with the status bar bullshit. These are among the worst UI design decisions ever made in an application that's so widely used. They both harmed usability significantly, with no benefits. The 20 extra pixels at the
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if simple actions that were easily accessible via the traditional menus now take us 30 seconds or more to figure out how to do, if we can even do them at all, since the UI changes have been put in place.
Install Status-4-Evar and move on with your life. Oh, wait, less drama - nm., as you were.
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Menu bar, tabs and status bar all have options to be put back to 3.x style and once you change back the to the classic look they stay there through upgrades. Putting a close button on the status bar is kind of bizarre and petty though.
As for plugins working, the only problem I ever have with my 18 extensions is that no-script and ghostery clash and cause browser freezes with new page loads.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Making your life "much more complicated"? It's an outdated web browser. Update to something modern and move on with your life.
Fucking fusspot nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to browse the current web, use a current browser. You may *want* to use an older browser, but clearly it's not working out for you. I may *want* to spread butter with a screwdriver, but I'd be better of using a tool appropriate for the job.
I'm sure you're feeling indignant about being "forced" to upgrade, and I'm sure you think your reasons for wanting to hang onto an old piece of software are valid. Nobody else cares. Either fix it for yourself or move on.
Re:Fucking fusspot nerds (Score:4, Funny)
Oh come off it mate.
We all know what you REALLY want to do with that buttery screwdriver.
You nasty bastard.
Firefox 3.6 has lower RAM usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually don't agree with your premise. While Firefox had some issues around version 4, Firefox 10 is actually faster and more stable than Firefox 3.6 was, and RAM usage is on a downward trend. I understand that Firefox ~4 turned you off because I was really irritated by the regressions that came around that time, but things *did* get better. If you give it another try and make sure you give it a fair shake without already having decided it's worse, I think you'll find it's actually an improvement over what you're using right now. It's not like Firefox 3.6 was a speed demon in its day either... Firefox's memory hog problems go back way further than that.
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Cancelling some moderation here, but I finally went for 10 from 3.6 once the ESR was available. It's not been a nightmare, but certainly no picnic. Windows 7 now frequently suggests I close FF to free memory, whereas it never did before. I also get lots of slow script warnings I did not have before. The only pro I've found is that 10 is better at restoring eozens of tabs, as it does not try to load them all at once.
Re:Firefox 3.6 has lower RAM usage? (Score:4, Informative)
http://i.imgur.com/RaZt7.png [imgur.com]
I suggest setting this setting. It will load the tab only when you click the tab itself, making loading a lot faster (and this only works only when you restore tabs on the first launch).
My friend, we have just the thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Luddite refuses to upgrade. News at 11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're being forced to run obsolete software by some perverse corporate mandate, you have no excuse nor valid reason for running such outdated software. You are the smoking clunker on the highway of the internet. You are the grey haired granny in the fast lane of the web. The road hazard. The surfing security hole.
Are you getting it?
You are the security risk.
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How often should people be required to upgrade? Keep in mind that upgrading does break things very often, and Firefox is among the leaders of breakage. Upgrading takes time. And with something like Firefox, that's a very critical point to be broken, because you may not be able to access anything until the glitches and other bugs are worked around (which is often slow when answers are not forthcoming on the forums where asked). My last Firefox upgrade took 2 weeks to get it working right.
And of course yo
Re:Luddite refuses to upgrade. News at 11. (Score:5, Informative)
They'll stop providing security updates in a month, though, so it's certainly obsolescent and will be obsolete shortly.
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portableapps is what you want.
Make your own fork (Score:4, Informative)
I'll skip the obvious question about why you don't like new Firefox or other browsers and try another tact.
Since this is all open source software, why don't you find like minded people and make a new fork based on Firefox 3.6? If you want to go older than Firefox 3.6, you can always use K-Meleon. [sourceforge.net]
Two Choices (Score:4, Informative)
You have essentially two choices: stay on 3.6 after EOL and deal with it, or upgrade.
Staying on 3.6 (Which I have to do one one machine because it's a G4 Mac and already has no support) is an option, but eventually, depending on what kind of websites you frequent, you may get pwn3d. But if you restrict yourself to known-good websites, and use extensions like AdBlock, FlashBlock, and possibly GreaseMonkey, you can probably coast along for years.
Upgrading to a new browser (Especially on Linux) is also not a terrible idea. Firefox 10 is actually pretty good about RAM use (Better than Chrome 17, for my uses), and you can set the interface to match Firefox 3.6 so you don't have to re-train yourself to the new look and feel. It's even a bit more snappy than Firefox 3.6, and it does have some nice features for web-centric users (Like pinned apps, and Firefox sync).
I understand the "I'm staying here" feeling, but unless you're willing to make some serious compromises, you're on your own.
FUD (Score:3)
If you can't stand the constant updates you can always get the ESR (extended support release) [mozilla.org]. If you have javascript enabled then upgrading is absolutely worth it. Firefox 10 also has add-ons set to compatible by default so your add-ons should work unless the developer has opted out, or the add-on uses binary components. Memory usage has also improved leaps and bounds since 4.0 - I dare say it is better then 3.6 since I can now leave it running overnight with no adverse effects when I go back to it
Get the Source Code . . . (Score:3)
Get the extended release version (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in the same boat, I just (two weeks ago) switched from 3.6 to 10. I still have 3.6 installed just in case, but so far I'm adjusting.
In order to have some stability though, try the ESR version, it's what I'm using. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html [mozilla.org] And if you want to read the FAQ, go with http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ [mozilla.org]
So far, there are a few hiccups. There were a few add-ons that didn't make the switch, but they were rarely used, so I haven't noticed their absence yet. The tab size is annoying and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet. The old about:config fix doesn't work, and the userchrome.css fix just screws things up more.
I did need to readjust the default layout, the lack of a refresh and stop button is just annoying, but they're easy to add back. I like having a user interface, so yeah, that.
Noscript and Adblock plus work. I recommend the "status-4-evar" addon to get the status bar back.
Overall, I haven't noticed the slowdown or memory consumption. Of course, everyone's mileage will vary.
One new feature, at least new for me, is that you have FF restore all your tabs after you close your browser, but when you start back up, the tabs won't load unless you click on them. I really like this feature. Back in 3.6, it could take a really long time to restore a browsing session.
Overall though, the shock of switching isn't as bad as you think.
I think I should probably end this post with instructions on doing a side-by-side install. Before installing anything, make a copy of your firefox profile. Then edit the 'profiles.ini' to reflect this, it's up a folder or two from the profiles. In the profiles.ini, make a new name, something like myff10stuff for your profile. Then, get the ESR build and install to a different folder, but do not start FF at the end of the install. Edit the existing FF shortcut or make your own, but put -P on the end. it should read something like
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 10\firefox.exe" -P myff10stuff
All that is because the profile manager doesn't let you copy an existing profile. You can delete, rename, or create a new one, but you can't copy. You'll probably want to do the same thing to the 3.6 copy and use the 3.6 profile.
Opera welcomes you (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera is where I went after I stopped feelin' Firefox. Tab groups, notes, mail/irc/bittorrent/rss clients built in, Opera Turbo for those times you're tethering and need to conserve on your wireless cap, gestures, widgets and extensions (including AdBlock and NoScript), speed dial, session preservation, private browsing, reasonable memory usage, skins and themes, configurable download behavior, configurable keyboard shortcuts, a sane release schedule, and performance that frequently rivals Chrome. Also, it runs on basically anything - Windows (as early as 2000 with the current version, I believe), OSX, virtually every flavor of Linux, and Solaris (and basically every mobile operating system ever developed), and the Windows installer for Opera is nearly 33% smaller than the most recent edition of Firefox. While it's not Richard-Stallman-Free, it is freeware now.
To be fair, the only issues I've had were with some IE specific sites. The most prominent example is...basically every version of Outlook Web Access Microsoft ever released, even though the more recent versions have worked correctly on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Sharepoint at work does work correctly, however lists aren't rendered in database view the way they are in IE. Opera tends to take standard compliance to the point where it seems as if the browser says, "if I don't render it right, the site is wrong". While technologically correct, in practice Firefox handles these kinds of sites with much more practical grace, in no small part because FF is almost invariably a part of website design testing, while Opera is less frequently tested. Still, it's the rare exception for websites to not display correctly in Opera, at least to the point of getting the content you need, but even these discrepancies are relatively infrequent.
Switch to IE 5.5 (Score:4, Funny)
Low RAM usage, pretty stable on Windows 98 & 2000. Yeah, IE 5.5, that's the ticket!
Switched to Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
My laptop only has 2GB of RAM, so I can't run Firefox anymore anyway, so I switched to Chrome.
A browser should not consume 1.2GB of RAM (and Firefox 10, 11, 53, 1275, or whatever they're up to now, WILL consume that much if you leave a GMail tab open long enough)
Re:Hard-core user? (Score:5, Funny)
One whose head is too hard to upgrade to a newer version.
Re: (Score:3)
Newer is not always better. People on slashdot should be tech savvy enough to know that much.
Re: (Score:3)
Totally agree. The thing is though that the web is a platform which is still in its infancy and still has its kinks being worked out, which requires all parties to keep moving on. FF3.6 must not become the next IE6. For IE6 at least there was no upgrade path for a long time. There is for FF, and there are enough alternatives if you do not like the upgrade path.
Re:Hard-core user? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you should upgrade to 10.0.
Here's three simple reasons:
1) New LTS version. It's going to be around for a while.
2) 10.0 is the fastest version, since maybe forever with Mozilla/Firefox.
3) No more default incompatibilities with add-ons. By default all plug-ins/add-on are compatible. Only those marked incompatible by the authors are incompatible.
The smart user will be doing testing on 3.6 now, before official support ends. So when it ends any known issues can be dealt with. Nothing worse than having to scramble to upgrade because of some newly discover security flaw. Scrambling leads to hurriedness which leads carelessness which leads to mistakes which leads to the darkside ... taking over your servers.
Re:wow, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Acrobat reader here of course exempted, because it reaches the remarkable achievement of managing to go slower AND using more RAM.).
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate Chrome, but it has it's uses. It's fast too. But totally sucks for configuring stuff, navigating my hundreds of bookmarks, importing said bookmarks in a sane way, and very anti-intuitive. Give me back a fucking menu, or keyboard shortcuts. God what an awful interface.
Other than that it's a wonderful browser.
Give me back my clutter.
Re: (Score:3)
why is it that every time we end up with twice the memory capacity on new machines, the application (especially GUI application) developers feel the need to double the size of their programs?
To give you a better user experience.
Re:Waterfox 64bit (Score:4, Insightful)
If they were smart, they would make ALL plugins run in a separate process, with the option to jail it. There's no reason for Flash to have access to even the files in your home directory. Jail it in its own process with an empty chroot directory. Then even I wouldn't have issues with it. I don't WANT to hate Flash. I just hate the way it gets used. And I don't install it because of that. I would install it if it were run the safe way.
192M of RAM is good enough for Firefox 10 (Score:3)
I've run Firefox on very old machines, and I can tell you that 192M is about the lower limit for version 10. Firefox 4 was a memory pig, but they started this Memshrink program. Firefox 10 really does not take much more than Firefox 3.6, and it's getting better. Currently, for memory usage, Firefox is the best of all the big browsers, better than Chrome, Opera, and IE.
Firefox 10 works okay on a 350MHz Pentium II with 192M RAM, but is unusably slow and flogs swap mercilessly if the computer has only 128
Re:I am also a 3.6 user who refuses to upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)
"Example the back and forward buttons in Firefox 3 has a small downarrow, showing you a quick convienient history of the last 10 pages per tab. (I hear that's removed in 4 onwards)"
yes it was removed, now you just right click the big ass back or forward button to get that same menu. Now this may seem like a inconsequential change, but on my crappy ass laptop, or on our netbook, or my buddies tablet, its much easier, quicker and less frustrating to right click a large target, rather than try to nail a 16x16 pixel icon with a pointing device that takes input as a general suggestion.
Re:You aren't even seeing the web (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, that browser is ridiculously outdated and web devs shouldn't (and often don't) have to cater to people who willingly choose to be so far behind standards. Fine, you don't like the new Mozilla, go find another modern web browser you do like. Either way, get over it and move on.
And what version do you think was current just ONE year ago (relative to your post and my reply on 2012-03-04)? Hint: 4.0 had not even come out yet. [wikipedia.org]
Don't be confused by the strange new numbering system the Firefox devs started to use at 4.0 and beyond just because its competitors were using accelerated release numbering. Under the traditional numbering scheme, the current version today (2012-03-04) would be around 4.6.1, making 3.6.27 merely one major version behind.
Or maybe we should be using release numbers based on year-month (like Ubuntu). Then we'd be seeing major release numbers 04.xx, 06.xx, 08.xx, and now 11.xx. Sure, it is time to be moving off of 08.xx. But it is NOT yet time to have expected everyone to complete that move, especially if they just got ON to 08.xx right before 11.xx came out (less than a year ago today).
At the very minimum, upgrades should not be required more often than every 2 years. 3 years is more reasonable. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 3 years (5 years for server versions). Slackware has been doing security updates to releases as old as 6 years or more.